Hey all,
Kaltura - who are kind benefactors of Wikimania this year, wanted to
pass on the following invite to those who are participating in Wikimania
- or those who may not be able to.
They've got two lonely videos on there right now. Consider uploading
your travel videos for some open-source collaboration/editing. Add as
many other videos as you can come across while you're in Alexandria. If
you can't make it, why not edit a video or add some reflections or views
of your own?
(PS, freshly blogged at
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/08/kaltura-and-wikimania-08-collaborative…)
Thanks!
Jay Walsh, Head of Communications
Here's the invitation from Lisa Bennet, Director of Public Relations and
Marketing, Kaltura
—
Hi Everyone,
As Wikimania is right around the corner, we’ve added a new great way to
share information about the event. I would like to invite you to the
Wikimania Video Site where you can create collaborative videos. The site
already has some videos where people can add their expectations for the
event or share why they can’t join us this year, and there will be
computer stations at Wikimania for attendees to add videos and pictures
in real-time from Alexandria. Hopefully, it will be a great resource for
people that could not be there in person to see the highlights, and for
the attendees to document the event.
Check it out at:
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Wikimania_Video_Site
The site is hosted on the Kaltura devwiki and uses the collaborative
video technology from Kaltura, which the Foundation partnered with late
last year to explore adding videos to Wikipedia and other projects.
You’re invited to share your experiences from Wikimania, play with the
technology, and provide your feedback.
Maybe this is not the most popular item, but I do like to comment on
the news about Japanese and Polish Wikipedias and their 500,000
articles each. In fact, jp.WP actually has 500,000, but pl.WP does
not.
In an attempt to compare Wikipedia language editions I have clicked
the button "random articles" and with a sample of 50 clicks each I
have calculated how many articles a language edition really has, minus
all those pseudo articles.
A pseudo article is e.g.
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikinihttp://co.wikipedia.org/wiki/191http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsseveldhttp://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandilhttp://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Bluff
Many Wikipedias loose, in my calculation, quite a huge percentage of
their articles. There is one honourable exception: Japanese Wikipedia,
which in 50 clicks showed absolutely no pseudo article. If Japanese
Wikipedia would have such a floppy policy about new articles as many
others have, jp.WP were already close to one million "articles". Pl.WP
has for about 300,000 real articles, very respectable, but not what it
seems to be.
Since the beginnings, Wikipedians report about the number of articles,
having to tell something about to the media and to be proud about
their achievements. They rank Wikipedia language editions by the
number of articles. This has caused tragical dynamics: many
Wikipedians and Wikipedias are so obsessed with this number that they
produce rubbish articles to show off. Volapük Wikipedia with more than
100,000 pseudo articles created by a single bot using user is only the
top of the iceberg, and when someone called to close vo.WP, vo.WP was
supported by a amazing number of users from many language editions:
cosi fan tutte. Wikipedians could and should use their time for more
useful article work.
It would be good if the community found a different way to compare or
to measure it's successes.
Ziko
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
Something similar happened at Wikibooks. We want a way to count the number
of books we have (as opposed to pages), and to list them. So Ramac and
Pietrodn wrote http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AllBooks, which
solves that problem quite well. The solution was rejected because it solves
the wrong problem.
The real problem is that the software has no way of knowing what a book is -
that is, there is no thing in the database identifying books. That is the
real problem, and once we solve it, we can implement many other solutions to
problems which stem from that (some thoughts at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mike.lifeguard/Wish_list). As
disappointing as that is for the Wikibooks community (and especially the
developers), it was the right choice. We should not implement an extension
just because it was written - that is what has been proposed.
Rejecting this solution is the correct course in this case because here too
the wrong problem is solved.
Mike
Hello everyone - this note is cross-posted on the Wikimedia blog at:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/01/wikimedia-foundation-2008-2009-annual-…
Earlier today we uploaded the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2008/2009 Annual Plan
presentation and Questions and Answers page to the Wikimedia Wiki. These
materials were approved at the June 20 Board of Trustees meeting. They can be
accessed via the Finance Report page:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Finance_report
Posting our plan and (hopefully) answering some of your questions in advance is
part of our commitment to providing transparent information about the Foundation’s
goals and spending.
The Annual Plan lays out projected spending through the next fiscal year (which
for us starts today and runs the rest of the year). The plan describes spending
in our three main operational areas: technology, programming, and financeand
administration. We also introduce our 2008/2009 organizational goals, which we
hope to discuss in more detail in the coming months.
For your information and awareness!
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
On Jan 8, 2008 6:19 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> <snip>
>
Forgive me if some of this is retreading old ground, but I've over 50
> messages for this list since yesterday. Can we have a rerun (or a January
> run) of the top poster stats? I was 2nd last time and felt embarrassed
> despite having thought most of what I wrote was close to the topic in
> question.
>
>
Posts in December to Foundation-l
1 Thomas Dalton - 123
2 Anthony - 70
3 Andrew Whitworth - 64
4 David Gerard - 48
5 Florence Devouard - 47
6 Brian McNeil - 43
7 Nathan Awrich - 36
8 Ray Saintonge - 33
T9 GerardM - 32
T9 Mike Godwin - 32
T9 Erik Moeller - 32
-Robert Rohde
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It is with great pleasure that I welcome Erik Zachte as a part-time
contractor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Erik will start work with us
officially on September 1.
Erik has worked as a Technical Analyst for Air France - KLM for more
than two decades. He is probably most famous in the Wikimedia community
as the developer of "WikiStats" (stats.wikimedia.org), an amazing
statistics package that reveals data about the growth and editing
patterns in our various wiki projects.
Erik has created many other wonderful tools, featured at
http://infodisiac.com/ . In his part-time role with the Wikimedia
Foundation, he will continue to maintain and develop code to provide
critical operational metrics about our projects. A key first project,
for example, will be the integration of traffic statistics into the
WikiStats package. These metrics will be key to communications,
fundraising, internal evaluation, and for many other purposes.
We're working in parallel to provide Erik with the support he needs to
do his work, including more regularly provisioned dumps and hardware
to run his scripts.
I'm very pleased that Erik is joining our team, and look forward to
working with him. Please join me in welcoming him. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Thank you all for your nice words!
> I am very much looking forward to serve the community and the
> foundation further in this new position.
> Later this month (when back from holiday) I will publish a list of
> ideas for improving and extending wikistats, so that everyone can
> comment on it. Topics on the list range from technical improvements
> for current scripts (foremost to improve performance) to rough ideas
> on whole new areas of analysis. As Brion already indicated,
> incorporating and extending Domas' work on visitor statistics will
> initially be my primary focus.
> Erik Zachte
Hoi.
The Babel templates are widely used on the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis.
Implementing them is a lot of work; you need more then 1000 templates just
to cover the languages that the Wikimedia Foundation supports in its
projects. Several Wikis have templates to support additional languages. For
the bigger projects this is no longer an issue as the templates have already
been created, but for many of the smaller projects getting the Babel
information implemented is a lot of work. It would be great if the time
could be saved to do something that is really useful like writing articles.
At Betawiki we have been working hard to create a Babel extension. The great
news of an extension is, that there is no need to do anything but implement
the extension. We currently think that the software is at a state where we
would like to invite the last comments leading to the implementation on all
the WMF wikis.
Thanks,
Gerard